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Legos for Grown-Ups, From a Child at Heart

Legos will undoubtedly find their way under many a tree this holiday season. But while people usually associate the Danish toy with childhood, there is a booming community of adult fans of Lego, too. Like children, they replicas of all sorts of things with the colorful pieces: entire cities, cars, “Star Trek" characters and, in the case of David Cole, animals taxidermy style.

Mr. Cole, a 26-year-old Web designer from California who lives in Brooklyn, created a palm-size Lego model of a mounted deer head in early November. He submitted it to what he calls “a couple blogs friendly to nerdy design stuff,” and it soon went viral. The design may not be large or overly complex, but it clearly struck a chord: he has more than 1,500 orders to fill. He has just added a fox and a bear to the line.

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David Cole, a Web designer in Brooklyn, constructs palm-size models of animals out of Legos.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

How did you become fascinated by Legos?

It was my mom buying us kits. She’s a Web designer and always gave us creative things: pencils, pens, paper, cameras, anything about artistic expression. My mom is a child of the ’60s and ’70s and grew up with a hippie parenting style. She wanted me to be a creative from Day 1. In elementary school I was in the gifted and talented program, and we did logic puzzles and creative exercises and a lot of free play with Legos.

I think many people outgrow the toys of their childhood. Why do you think you didn’t?

I do a lot of pixel art, and there’s a lot of overlap between pixel art and Lego creation because of how low-fi and grid-based it is. All Lego pieces are on a square grid, as are pixels on a screen. So when you’re designing for either of them, you have to think of the fidelity you can have. You start with the smallest detail you want and work out from there. With animals, I try to design the faces first and work out to the rest of the body. If the body is too small, I can’t do the face meaningfully.

How did it go from creative pursuit to “Hey, I can sell this”?

My profession is Web designer and that’s been my only profession since I was 19. When you’re working in a pure digital world, you get jealous of other designers making physical goods that you get to hold in your hand. I think every Web designer would agree with that. I don’t get to touch anything I make. You miss that tactile relationship.

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His deer head is a 60-piece kit.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

But the Lego models weren’t the first things you actually produced.

The first thing I did was print crosswords I designed, as an experiment with creating physical things. I started thinking about what other physical things I could design that people might like. A lot of other designers do posters and T-shirts, but I wanted to see if there was something more unusual I could try, in another medium. A lifelong passion for Legos seemed like a good step.

Well, you totally nailed the taxidermy trend. Do you live with taxidermy?

We have four pairs of antlers, a quail on the wall, a turtle shell, a snake in a classic coiled pose and a lot of insects. My wife, Ashleigh, did all the insect taxidermy. She learned how to mount insects, which is its own involved process.

So I was literally looking around my own apartment for inspiration. I specifically wanted to do a piece that was nice for people’s offices, something that could go on their desks, and I wanted it to be appropriate for a small gift or stocking stuffer. I also like the contrast between the child-friendly medium of Legos and that it’s a bit morbid to have a dead animal. There’s some irony there that made me laugh.

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A fox.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Did you draw it out first?

There’s a software you can use to create and render and purchase parts. I was working in the software to come up with the first ideas, and then I moved to physical Legos to see how it would fit together. I tested the idea for structural integrity and whatnot.

How long did it take?

The deer came together pretty fast. Once I got my head around the software — it was the first time I’ve done anything outside the pieces I own — it took maybe a day or two to put the idea together and match it against the parts that were out there and purchase them. I had to make revisions once I got the pieces. The way I had designed it, it would fall apart completely. The software won’t model gravity.

It seems like a lot of Legos to have lying around.

Right now I have 15,000 pieces I have to hand-sort, one by one. My living room is filled with Legos that have to be organized and put in individual boxes.

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A bear.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

You sell the deer as a kit.

It has about 60 pieces, and I hand-drew the instruction pamphlet, step by step — about 40 steps — and hand-stamped the package. For me this was less about the Lego thing and more about selling a tangible good and having a relationship with my work, and an opportunity to do it in a manual way.

Would you ever do a life-size deer head?

I did get approached by a guy who wanted a life-size deer head, but the quotes I gave him didn’t elicit a response. A lot of people who do Legos do large commission pieces, but that doesn’t interest me, because there’s no scale problem. I try to start with the smallest detail and grow it out so the detail I want to capture is rendered. If you’re doing a life-size deer, there’s no part of it that’s so small that you can’t render it. There’s no problem to solve. If you look at large-scale Lego pieces, they look realistic. There’s none of the abstraction.

A version of this interview appears in print on December 22, 2011, on page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Toys for Grownups, From a Child at Heart. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe